(WTAJ) — This isn’t the first time internet users have disagreed with each other, and it certainly won’t be the last. This time, an online war is raging over the answer to a purported second-grade math question.
A mother posted what she said was her child’s second grade math homework, asking: “There are 49 dogs registered to compete in the dog show. There are 36 more small dogs registered than large dogs. How many small dogs are registered?”
The comments were fierce, ranging from simple answers to solutions using complex algebra that a second-grader could never comprehend, the latter of which called into question the legitimacy of this being homework for a seven-year-old.
Some agreed that this was a question of reading comprehension, but others said it was impossible to answer because “you couldn’t have half a dog.”
“…so what breed is 0.5 small and 0.5 large?” one person commented on the Facebook post.
The answer actually lies in fractions.
The WTAJ digital team worked on this, and Olivia Bossard from that team made the following decisions:
“First, we need 36 small dogs, so we subtract 36 and group them as small dogs. Then we divide the remaining 13 into two categories: large and small dogs. But we need to divide it in a way that we can create a class of X and a class of X+36. That’s not possible with this formula because 13 is a prime number.”
Because 13 is a prime number, when we divide it we get the answer 0.5, which obviously means we don’t get half a dog.
What do you think the answer is? If your child came home with homework like this, would you be able to help them?
